Considering Magento?

Magento is the most widely used open source ecommerce platform in the world. What could it do for your business?

Magento is used by over 250,000 merchants, and is the world’s most popular open source ecommerce platform. At Strange, we’ve been using the platform for ecommerce solutions since 2010, and long before that with Magento’s predecessor, osCommerce.

Top 10 advantages of Magento

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1. Lower cost

Without the cost of an annual license fee and a non proprietary technical stack, the total cost of ownership with Magento is often much lower than with its competitors.

Magento comes in various editions and the open source free community edition is the most popular. It comes with great out of the box functionality and can be customised and extended to meet most ecommerce requirements, including those of the paid for Enterprise edition.

2. Large community

If you need a custom solution, the cost and compexity is lower with Magento. This is because there are thousands of developers and companies working on the Magento platform, so there's usually a good starting point for extensions to the core system to meet a specific business requirement. In addition to the cost advantage, there's a lot of commonality and standardisation in Magento solutions.

Given the size and position of Magento in the marketplace, it's fair to say that most suppliers that are serious about ecommerce will already have developed a robust Magento extension.

An estimated 150,000+ developers are working on the platform. So unlike proprietary ecommerce systems, this makes it relatively easy to find an agency that suits you.

If you're considering switching agencies, the standardisation of the platform and development approach can make this process easier. We're often asked to take over Magento websites and it's a relatively simple process, provided the site has been developed according to best practice.

3. Powerful functionality

Magento comes with some pretty solid functionality out of the box, without any customisation. The Community edition feature set includes much of the feature set that companies will need to trade online. Obviously you may need to extend functionality, but we find that the basics are covered well.

4. Easily extendable and configurable

With many extensions and configuration options, Magento can be customised to meet most ecommerce requirements. A word of caution though, many extensions are great, but some are poorly written and can be more trouble than they're worth. The cost of extensions is often very low, but the additional time required to make them work properly can be significant.

A key benefit of working with Strange is that we know which extensions are good and which will likely result in problems and additional cost.

5. Multiple front end websites

Magento's built-in multi store, multi currency, multi lingual capabilities make it an ideal platform if you're looking to operate multiple consumer front end websites. Getting your multi site strategy right takes some careful planning, but the feature set within Magento is powerful and supports these types of requirements very well.

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6. Technical architecture

We’ve always been fans of the Magento codebase. We know that the 1.x was a bit ‘clunky’ and now seems a little old fashioned, but with Magento 2, you can benefit from more modern coding approaches.

7. Connectivity

The API layer, particularly with Magento 2, enables great connectivity between different systems. The API layer is well engineered, well documented and perfectly suited for today’s digital footprints.

8. Solid SEO

One of the ways we build better websites with Magento is that we make sure we really undestand your SEO objectives and how best to achieve them. From an SEO perspective, the technical engineering for the Magento platform is well thought though. URL Rewrites, manipulation of Meta items and caching techniques – Magento 2 integrates with Varnish – are just some of the SEO friendly capabilities of the platform.

9. Hosting and DevOps

Successful retailers know that hosting and site management are as important as the onsite retailing of products. They understand that conversion rates, user satisfaction and SEO are impacted by site speed and they value a stable and robust DevOps environment.

Magento is very flexible in how this is managed. You're free to choose fixed server type hosting providers as well as cloud based offerings such as Amazon AWS. DevOps is also well catered for with the likes of Docker, Ansible and Git.

10. No tax on growth

With Magento you do not pay more as your store or customer base gets bigger. Being open source, there’s no sliding scale of payments as your inventories grow or your turnover increases. This allows you to plan accordingly and focus your efforts on growing your sales without worrying about additional website charges.